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- A writer encounters the owner of an aging high-class hotel, who tells him of his early years serving as a lobby boy in the hotel's glorious years under an exceptional concierge.
- Two decades after the first Independence Day invasion, Earth is faced with a new extra-Solar threat. But will mankind's new space defenses be enough?
- While on a tour of the White House with his young daughter, a Capitol policeman springs into action to save his child and protect the president from a heavily armed group of paramilitary invaders.
- The story of the final seven months in the life of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
- A multinational expedition discovers a lost city beneath a pyramid, where they must stop the reawakened gods of ancient Egypt from initiating the Apocalypse.
- The little swift Manou grows up believing he's a seagull learning to fly he finds out he never will be. When he runs from home he meets birds of his own species and finds out who he really is.
- The biopic film follows visionary Inventor Carl Benz, who invented the first car and was the founding father of Mercedes-Benz.
- Max Schmeling's fights against Joe Louis are listed in the best ten boxing matches of all time.
- Documentary series about 1,000 years of German history. Reviewing the history from about 955 A.D. to the modern-day monarchy and World War I.
- On 21. September 2013, telecommunications satellite APV-1312 belonging to French media group CanalDouble crashes into the Brandenburg Gate, cutting a trail of destruction as far as the Reichstag. 56 delegates die. Thirteen minutes later, all around the world more and more satellites plummet to earth. Communications, as we have known them, are collapsing everywhere. West of Geneva. At the largest research laboratory in the world, with a budget of one billion dollars, an experiment has failed that is going to throw the whole world off its hinges. Scientists from 80 nations have simulated the Big Bang with the so-called 'God Machine', the world's greatest particle accelerator, and thereby created a Black Hole. Reaching Geneva turns into a tour de force for our heroes, through a country that like its neighbors is in a state of total emergency, but equally into a time of human encounters. A time, where courage overcomes the fear and human beings do not shut themselves off but take decisive action. A time, where the end is a beginning, and where two brothers become soul mates again. A time, where weakness turns into strength and individuals are unified into a single nation. A time, where despair turns into hope, and loneliness into the love of a lifetime. A time, where one look says more than a thousand words, and even the smallest individuals become giants. Europe's darkest hour turns into a time of patriotic heroes. Heroes just like you and me...
- The Old and New World in 1491, and the biological conquest after their collision.
- Little Fritz Fuchs and his friend Roman Zenkert are about to recover Hannibal's legendary Alpenschatz. However, as an avalanche in the cave goes down, the jammed Fritz is ignored by his "buddy" ignominiously. Decades later, Fuchs is overtaken by his past. Because the nasty Zenkert still wants to get by all means in the possession of the treasure. After many entanglements and entanglements, the second treasure hunt in the mountains leads to a heated finale.
- Outside of time, a teen hooker, lo-fi cowboy and mute drifter cross a white desert to experience the final gig of their mysterious rockstar hero.
- In a small inn, the impoverished Baron von Münchhausen tries to keep his head above water with the help of his stories.
- Imagine finding out that a comet is coming to earth at a high rate of speed.
- 13 Skippers from Stuttgart, Germany start with their Crews for a 'round Atlantic Ocean' Trip. They originate from a small sailing Club situated on a little Pond surrounded by vineyards. Now they set out to the wide Ocean. From the African influenced Capverde Islands to the soothing Caribbean, along the US Coast via Metropolitan New York to remote Newfoundland and then back to the Azores Islands. All in one Ship, a sailing Yacht called 'Odysseus'(Ulysses). 48 feet long, 24 feet tall and 19 tons in weight. They have to adjust to the Weather and Winds everyday. We are on board. We experience life on the Sail Boat hands on. We feel what it means to be sailing: eating and sleeping on the edge, living with the Crew on limited Space, keeping an eye on the waves day and night and always changing plans according to the winds. This voyage's success is set by the wind and the experience of the sailors only. 13 Skippers in one Boat are determined to sail round the Atlantic Ocean. It is an extraordinary team effort. You will discover the fascination of Sailing.
- 10 amateur sailors prepare with great enthusiasm for their first ORC race at the famous Sailing week in Kiel, Germany. Will they succeed? Great interviews with lots of sailing fun.
- Frederic I Barbarossa, whose (Hohen) Staufian dynasty's 'home duchies' were in the Southwest, successfully unestablished himself as German king when his cousin duke Henry the Lion, of the northern main duchy Saxony's Welfian dynasty, helped him subdue Italy -horribly sacking mighty Milan, which held out last- and the pope crowned him Roman Emperor in 1155. Frederic's grand dynastic wedding to the Burgundian duke's daughter was followed by a dispute over a papal address using 'beneficium', which can mean either favor or feudal grant, to which he responded proclaiming the empire itself Holy, held from God directly. Henry's loyalty was rewarded with the Bavarian duchy, while he extended the empire east by subduing Slavic heathens, but later his de facto rival power and refusal to enter another campaign to subdue the Italian cities lead to a confrontation and Henry's undoing. Frederic's glory ended as drowned crusader.
- Squire Otto von Bismark, the diplomatically brilliant Ministerpräsident (chief minister) of far less astute, often unwilling Prussian king Wilhelm, survived an attempt on his life and conceived a cunning strategy to unite Germany, some thirty independent monarchies since the Napoleonic era, under Prussia's Hohenzollern dynasty. First a war against Austria, the imperial Habsburg rival for predominance in the former Holy Roman Empire, allowed uniting the Northern League states. Soon after, he and the proud French emperor Napoleon III headed for a Franco-German war, in which the reluctant Southern monarchs has to take the Prussian side. After the 1870 Sedan victory, the French empire collapsed and Bismarck arranged for gay king Ludwig of Bavaria, the major southern state, whose wasteful romantic castles Bismarck financed as blackmail base, to offer Wilhelm the crown of a new German Empire. It got an elected diet (parliament), which despite a generous social policy ended up left-wing, against conservative Bismarck. Shortly after Wilhelm was succeeded by his grandson Wilhelm II, the loyal statesman, was dismissed, and rightly predicted the empire would soon crumble.
- German king Henry IV, future emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, was orphaned young and traumatized during his mother's regency and his own kidnapping till majority by the imperial bishops and princes. When the reformist monk Hldebrandt became pope Gregory IV, declared only the Holy Chair superior by divine right to all earthly monarchs and denied them the investiture (right to install bishops, traditionally the emperor-loyal counterweight to feudal dynasties), Henry started a power struggle. Excommunicated, Henry had to beg readmission to the church at Canossa castle, but once that was obtained, suppressed the rebellious imperial princes and bishops in war. Later he even installed an anti-pope, who crowned Henry Holy Roman emperor, while Gregory died in exile and a compromise allowed the monarchs to install the bishops concerning all temporal privileges of their sees.
- Augustinian monk Marthin Luther spearheaded protests in the Holy Roman Empire against abuses in the Catholic church, where often aristocratic prelates behaved like princes rather then pastors. His 'back to the Bible' reasoning became opportune for many princes opposing the autocratic aspirations of Habsurg king of Spain Charles, elected Roman Emperor, who got Luther condemned in the Diet, but the Saxon elector, who remained Catholic, offered him sanctuary. Luther sides with the princes against the great peasant rising, translated the Bible into German and escaped execution. After the Augustianian Confession, his moderate proposal to maintain theological unity despite dismembering the church was rejected by emperor as well as pope, he radicalized, proclaimed celibacy abolished and lived as landed housemother. His legacy was manifold, besides splitting the church also politically and culturally, in some ways foreboding the present federal Germany, but also started centuries of religious wars and persecution.
- Paradoxically, nobody did more for the emergence of Germany in the 18th and 19th century then Napoléon. At first he was welcomed as a liberator and modernizer, replacing feudal privileges and traditions with more rational administration, but as his continuous wars exacted a high price on the people in blood and taxes he became hated as a foreign oppressor. He defeated Prussia and Austria, who lost territory, annexed the left bank of the Rhine and reorganized the bulk of Germany into fewer and larger, solely secular states, confederated in the Rheinbund. After the annihilation of Napoleon's -conscripted, in part German- Grande Armée by the Russian Winter and ultimate defeats in the Battle of the Peoples near Leipzig and Waterloo (1815), the Vienna Congress partially restored the old order. However, the Holy Roman Empire remained abolished and the new German Federation was founded on a national feeling which re-emerged during the resistance against Napoleon, championed by Prussia, where Freiherr vom Stein (from Nassau), had also introduced significant reforms.
- Charlemagne, king of the Franconian tribe, founded the Holy Roman Empire, but is disintegrated by dividing succession without creating a nation, hence he's revered equally by Germany and France (East - viz. West Francia). Father of the medieval German nation, till then little more then a linguistic grouping of the Franconian, Saxon, Bavarian and Swabian (alias Allemannen) tribes (and duchies, the real political entities) was the Saxon duke Otto I, crowned king by the archbishop of Mainz (Mayence) in 961. His authority rested upon the successful defense of Germany, and all Western Europe, against the Magyar (Hungarian) invaders, with whom his brother, the Swabian duke, had allied himself in rivalry for the succession, in the decisive battle on the Lachfeld, mythically ascribed to a Holy Lance, part of the German insignia, actually Carolingian but associated with the Passion of Christ. Later Otto turned to Italy, where he was crowned Roman Emperor by the pope, thus defining the Holy Rman Empire of the German Nation, and the German people got its name, after the Ancient Teutonic tribe. To gain Byzantinian recognition, Otto wed his son Otto II with princess Theophane.
- Frederic II the Great of Prussia and the contemporary Habsburg imperial couple, archduchess Maria Theresia and husband Francis, rivaled for preeminence in the German heartland of the empire. Frederic modeled his capital Berlin on Versailles, Vienna was Europe's grandest royal city. Frederic's superior army, an immense burden on his small population, performed superbly in great wars, mainly over Silesia and Saxony. Still, they were excessive risks, possibly the result of a most frustrated youth as sensitive, culture-hungry crown prince abused by a brutish father who even executed his best friend. The rivalry was key in European alliances. Maria Theresia had to be bailed out by her Hungarian nobility.
- Robert Blum from Leipzig (Saxony) was a moderate liberal and German nationalist, who believed unifying Germany under French revolution principles was the way out of 19th century misery, which even lead to massive emigration. The revolutionary wave trough Europe in 1948 swept trough most German principalities, allowing liberties and/or elections. Robert was among the first delegates elected throughout Germany for a 'pre-parliament' in Frankfurt am Main, which declared the transformed German League a republic. The Prussian refusal to repulse a Danish invasion from Schleswig stirred radicals to divert from the gradual line into an open revolt against the monarchies, which meant civil wars and the bloody crushing of rebels. Blum participated in the Vienna revolt against the emperor and was executed as an example, despite a review of the illegal death sentence which arrived too late.
- The Empire had settled on the principle of rulers determining their principalities' religion, but then Habsburg king of Bohemia and 'soon to be elected' Emperor Ferdinand's attempt to impose his Catholicism on the mainly protestant Bohemians (against the oath of his enthronement) caused an escalation of violence spreading through Germany beyond his financial means: the Thirty Years War wrecked the country and killed a third of the population. The Bohemian nobleman Albrecht von Wallerstein offered an alternative: an army of 50,000 mercenaries paid for by being allowed to plunder and exacting all of their needs from the occupied (protestant) territories. He repelled the Danish invasion, but was deposed after his fellow Catholic electors joined his opposition and awarded the Mecklemburg duchy. Swedish King Gustaf Adolf Wasa (invading South to Bavaria) forced Wallenstein to be reinstated, yet his autonomous negotiations with the imperial protestants caused the Emperor to have him proscribed. After his murder, the Prague Peace Treaty proved pointless as neighbors France and Sweden wouldn't allow the Empire to be welded together. Only in 1648 an unprecedented pan-European congress in Münster and Osnabrück reached the Westphalian Peace.
- German emperor Wilhelm (William) II dreams of a colonial empire rivaling the other great European powers' overseas territories, but is simply too late. Still he and his government manage to build a fast-growing, modern, rich homeland with a strong army and a rising navy. His and French emperor Napoleon III's vanity play a part, like Bismarck's system of balancing alliances, in the outbreak of the Great War, the first nightmare worthy to be called a 'world war', ignited in the Balkanic powder keg by his Austrian major ally's escalating conflicting with Serbia and its Russian protector. Instead of the intended fast victory, it bogged down in the trenches nightmare and brought down empires and dynasties, including Hohenstaufen's own, after his generals took over political control.
- The history of the Forbidden City begins with a bloody coup at the beginning of the 15th century, when the ambitious field commander Prince Zhu Di took power. He declared Beijing the new capital of China and ordered the construction of the Forbidden City, a symbol of his divine and almighty power. However, Yongle's destiny was to be intimately tied to the empire's collapse.
- She was the ruthless "dragon lady" that subjected the last regents of the Dragon Throne to becoming her marionettes. The emperor's widow Cixi was one of the most powerful women in Chinese history. She came to the Forbidden City as a young concubine in 1850. Quickly winning the favor of the Chinese emperor, she rose through the ranks and became the empire's most important woman.
- 1982–7.0 (11)TV EpisodeAlthough water makes our planet into life only known home, past, present and future of our oceans remain largely unknown, only 10% having actually been scientifically studied. Since a decade, natural scientists cooperate in the worldwide marine life census project to record the biotopes and wildlife in all seas. They are astounded how great the variety is. Fossils remain the main source for marine natural history.
- August the strong, so called on account of his physical strength and virility in bed, was the most famous and ambitious elector of Saxony, a quiet and wealthy part of pre-united Germany. He had many children from numerous mistresses, one of which tried to blackmail her way to the throne only to end up imprisoned even after his death. August was fashionably proud of his growing weight. He bought his election as king of Poland-Lithuania, a Catholic country so he converted, to his people's horror and wrecking his marriage. His political ambitions were crushed as anti-Swedish ally of the loosing Prussian-Russian side in the Nordic Wars, which spilled into partially wrecked Saxony. Yet he regained the throne and spent even more, partially profits from Maissen's novel porcelain, on a lavish Versailles-style capital, Dresden, arts and spoiling courtiers and aristocracy in general. Despite his treasury drain and political failure, his cultural legacy remains among Germany's grandest.
- Frederick II Hohenstaufen was an enlightened, tolerant, yet absolute king in the Neopolitan realm of the two Sicilies where he studied nature and science from Moors in self-designed castles. Having succeed as German king, he embarked on election as Holy Roman emperor but tired of the quarrelsome electors' endless mistrusting meddling, basically retiring to Italy. Pope Innocent IV condemned the hedonistic falconer fiercely for consorting with infidels, even after he successfully led the Sixth crusade and negotiated without great bloodshed the return of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem with the sultan's emir (general).
- Gustav Stresemann was a loyal imperial subject, even after the World war I defeat as an MP. Then he was part of the new Weimar republic for a moderate center party. As the Versailles treaty conditions caused the Rhineland and, illegally, the Ruhr heartland of German industry to be (maily Franch) occupied, civil disobedience could only be organized by printing money, which fatally wrecked the Mark currency. Elections forced the true republicans to espouse his party and offer him the 'political suicide' post of dire government Reichskanzler ('imperial chancellor', i.e. PM). After the military subdued leftist and regionalist insurrections, Stresemann survived a 1923 Hitlerian coup attempt from Bavaria solely because the Nazi leader nominated a rival of the army chief as war minister. Although his new currency and compromise with the French objectively saved the day, parliament threw him out. Ironically, he would remain as foreign minster while chancellors came and went, forging a Versailles settlement, until killed by an incurable cardiac condition in 1929; Hitler would be waiting for his successful second coup.
- 2008– 43m6.1 (16)TV EpisodeSketches of the humble, hence poorly documented position of women and the legacy of mighty monasteries in the Middle Ages serve as prelude to Hildegard's biography. She was an aristocratic novice in the subservient female component of the now ruined Wisigodenberg double cloister. After her magistra died from excessive asceticism, she succeed her, became a medicinal and mystic author like many monks and ultimately broke off the women as a separate nunnery. Her arrogance and unconventional mysticism, based on carnal love, nearly ended in a heresy condemnation, but pope Eugenius spared her.
- Future Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV lost his father in the Hundred Years War on the loosing French side at the battle of Crécy. The heir of the house of Luxemburg made Prague in his rich home kingdom of Bohemia his splendid capital after gaining the imperial election and surviving rival elector Louis the Bavarian's bid in a civil war. Even worse was the arrival in his reign of the Black Death, which killed one to two third of many city and regional populations in and around the empire, with grim side effects such as pogroms, which mainly wiped out debts to Jewish moneylenders. Charles established a negotiated method for the imperial election, enshrined in a Golden Bulla.
- Karl Marx was born in a bourgeois family of Jewish extraction, turned protestant in Trier, a peripheral, Catholic province of the Prussian realm. After a militant student time in the 'Burschenschaften', Karl embraced the French philosophy of communism. His revolutionary ideas soon led to exile in Paris, Brussels and London. His family life turned tragic, loosing several young children. He and wife Jenny would have starved in Soho without the support of Friedrich Engels, who even pretended to be Karl's bastard with the maid. His writings, mainly the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, has lasting influence on philosophy, economics and politics, but hardly as he intended.
- Charlemagne, son of a new dynasty started as ministers of the former Merovingian kings of the Franks, turned his people's realm into a Germanic empire, a Catholic rebirth of western Rome's, politically rivaling Byzantium, in alliance with the papacy. The Carolingian renaissance, a cultural restoration, was a huge success, ultimately founding a capital in Aachen. A major 'internal' obstacle was the resistance of heathen tribes, the largest of which were the Saxons. Their greatest leader, Widukind, was ultimately pressed to baptism rather then continue bloody oppression to impose conversion. The German people was thus forged, although major tribal realms would persist as duchies/electorates.
- King Ludwig II mounted the Bavarian throne at 19 at his father's death. His political ambition was to maintain Bavaria as truly sovereign member of the German League of 39 states established after the Vienna Congress. To resist the aggressive Prussian expansion of chancellor Bismarck, he had to side with Habsburg Austria, but was defeated on the battle field and reduced to a Prussian protectorate and forced to join the war against Napoleon III's France, which lead to the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty being declared German emperors. Ludwig withdrew in wild plans, as an absolutist island realm on Tenerife, and a crushingly expensive fantasy world of staged luxury, championed by castles such as Neuschwanstein and the Wagner theatre, soon running up a huge debt guaranteed by the treasury. The government ended up interning him as mentally incapacitated. His castle lake drowning, aged 40, with his psychiatrist, possibly a suicide related to his gay frustration, remains the stuff of legends.
- Born into a Jewish bourgeois family, Rosa Luxemburg adopted the Marxist ideals, remaining a revolutionary spinster. Her pacifist opposition against the imperial German mobilization earned her a year in jail and contributed to a split in the Gerlan Socialist party, SPD. With Karl Liebknecht, she ended up in its radical successor. After the imperial defeat, William II abdicated and a republic was to be born, but for months her Soviet-style ideal of 'socialist democracy' rivaled the regular Western model the new government ultimately achieved, after the tired masses and troops in majority approved of the necessarily violent putting down of what ended up re-founding itself Communist Party, KPD, both leaders being shot.
- In Frankenhausen, Thuringia, 1525, a mercenary army levied by German princes smashed the peasant mass lead by Thomas Munzer, an Altstadt middle-class-born former follower of Martin Luther, who refused to sacrifice the commoner interests to secular-princely demands in order to gain protection against papal excommunication as heresy. This worldly sequel to the ecclesiastic Reformation was Germany's first true social revolution, preaching liberty and equality as Biblical values. Munzer also found a safe harbor in Saxony, where he introduced 'vulgar' liturgy even before Luther. But his rejection of the entire social order couldn't be tolerated when his followers started using violence, plundering Catholic church property and Munzer himself failed in 1524 to convince the Saxon ruling aristocracy. The Memmingen 'peasant parliament' phrased 12 articles, rendering a bloodbath inevitable, as recommended by moderate 'rival' Luther. Over 100,000 peasants were crushed by well-armed professionals before Munzer himself was decapitated.
- 1982–7.0 (9)TV EpisodeWe still know very little about marine life, neither now nor its long evolution. A near constant are sharks, who became and remained the ultimate ocean hunters; yet even their spectacular life is barely beginning to be properly studied, undoing most assumptions. Even the geological basics, such as tectonic drift of continents, are fairly recent discoveries.
- While the Arab caliphate never came close to extinguishing its Christian equivalent, its Mulim successor, the Ottoman Turkish empire, would do so twice. Sultan Mehmet's conquest of Constantinopel (renamed Istanbul) in 1453, thanks to superior artillery breaching its legendary walls, reduced the Byzantine empire to a shady mess and the Orthodox countries ripe for the picking. After their gradual conquest of the Balkans, the Ottomans even laid siege to Vienna, but ultimately the Catholic Hansburg empire was saved by a great coalition. In how far these religious wars constitute true jihad is as debatable as the Christian content of the crusades, as profane 'realpolitik' generally proved the decisive factor.
- German Kaiser Wilhelm II considered the Ottoman sultan his natural ally against the British and French, and seemed acceptable as Germany has missed out on colonizing Muslim countries in the East. The Mahdi's revolt in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan showed Muslim risings could tie down British troops within the vast empire. As archeology enabled them to become acquainted with the Middle East and Arab leaders, Th. E. Lawrence 'of Arabia' and Cologne Jewish bankers son Max Oppenheim each tried to recruit the Arabs fro their country's side in World war I, but they chose more money and the -worthless- promise of independence from the Ottomans over a call to jihad from the great sultan.
- The crusades were, although also rooting in socio-economic and other motivations for conquest, mainly Catholic Holy Wars to defend Christianity, especially the threatened orthodox (albeit 'heretic') Byzantine empire, and pilgrims, notably to Jerusalem. Although dealing with tolerant Muslims was usually easier and offered better prospects, religious zeal stirred by such measures as papal appeals and indulgences resulted in full-fledged wars to reconquer the Holy Land. Intolerant Catholic crusader states were established instead of restoring Byzantine rule, all soon to fall prey again to Saracens. This ans successive attempts to reconquer the Holy Land again were bound to yield a heritage of violent hatred between major religions preaching peace.